Facebook Inc. Monday turned over 3,000 ads to Congress related to a Russian misinformation campaign that was intended to sway the hearts and minds of the American public.

According to a report in the New York Times, the ads covered a broad spectrum of sensitive issues in the U.S., with the faux-American accounts espousing opinions regularly heard from the hard right of the political spectrum.

One such account, “Defend the 2nd” endorsed gun rights in the U.S., while another account called “Secured Borders” was critical of immigration in the country. The Russian-based accounts also embraced the voice of the left with gay rights and antiracism support.

The Times reports that the accounts in question were all linked to a secret company based in St. Petersburg, Russia, called the Internet Research Agency. According to the report, the goal of the agency is to create viral links and create divisions, including political divisions.

The Daily Beast reported that one of the accounts, United Muslims of America, was created in Russia to drum up anti-American sentiment. This account had masqueraded as a very real account with a similar name, although minus the hostile anti-American ethos. “The Kremlin-backed trolls did all this while simultaneously using other accounts to hawk virulently Islamophobic messages to right-wing audiences on Facebook,” wrote the Daily Beast.

On Monday, Facebook reported that in all the misinformation campaign had reached about 10 million people, with about 25 percent of the ads not reaching anyone because they weren’t relevant to any specific audience.

In a lengthy post by Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of policy and communications and a confidant of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook discussed the right to post divisive opinions on a number of subjects and the necessity of free speech in a democratic country. It also said it required that those opinions come from “authentic” accounts.

“This manipulation runs counter to Facebook’s mission of building community and everything we stand for,” Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy, said in another post. “It is especially distressing that people tried to use our products to maliciously influence our election and divide us as a country.”

Facebook also said it’s in the process of creating a “new standard” of ad transparency, saying that it will add “more than 1,000 people to our global ads review teams over the next year,” and invest more in machine learning to “better understand when to flag and take down ads.”

Image: Geralt via Pixabay